Girl at War

I tried to get the clerk’s attention back. He ignored me and made change for the next man in line. I’d already lost the game, but I ran home as fast as I could anyway. “Mr. Petrović wanted me to pick Serbian or Croatian cigarettes,” I told Petar. “I didn’t know the answer and he wouldn’t give me any. I’m sorry.”

In school we’d been taught to ignore distinguishing ethnic factors, though it was easy enough to discern someone’s ancestry by their last name. Instead we were trained to regurgitate pan-Slavic slogans: “Bratstvo i Jedinstvo!” Brotherhood and Unity. But now it seemed the differences between us might be important after all. Luka’s family was originally from Bosnia, a mixed state, a confusing third category. Serbs wrote in Cyrillic and Croats in the Latin alphabet, but in Bosnia they used both, the spoken differences even more minute. I wondered if there was a special brand of Bosnian cigarettes, too, and whether Luka’s father smoked those.

Our class got two boys who looked close enough to our age to blend in. They were from Vukovar and spoke with funny accents. Vukovar was a small city a few hours away and had never meant much to me during peacetime, but now it was always in the news. In Vukovar people were disappearing. People were being forced at gunpoint to march east; people were becoming hemic vapor amid the nighttime explosions. The boys had walked all the way to Zagreb and they didn’t like to talk about it. Even after they settled in they were always a little dirtier, the circles beneath their eyes a little darker than ours, and we treated them with a distant curiosity.

As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.

After the bombing of the palace, Croatia had officially declared independence, inciting a flurry of modifications that called even the most mundane detail of our former lives into question. Pop singers famous across Yugoslavia recorded dual versions of their hits in both dialects; seemingly innocuous words like coffee had to be replaced with kava and kafa for Croatian and Serbian audiences. Even one’s greeting habits could be analyzed—a kiss on each cheek for hello was acceptable, three kisses too many, a custom in the Orthodox Church and therefore traitorous.

“They’re killing them,” the man said. “Who?” said my father, studying the paper for clues. “Everyone.” “Would you like some soup?” said my mother.

In America I’d learned quickly what it was okay to talk about and what I should keep to myself. “It’s terrible what happened there,” people would say when I let slip my home country and explained that it was the one next to Bosnia. They’d heard about Bosnia; the Olympics had been there in ’84.