“It’s the new medicine. Dr. Carson said it might happen.”
“Does that mean it’s working?” I said. My mother slammed her dresser drawer.
When my father got home my parents argued. They shouted about doctor bills and border crossings, about Banski Dvori and the shelters and America. They shouted about Rahela, then about me.
I held Rahela and paced the living room. The yelling seeped through our shared wall.
“I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of you telling me to wait,” my mother said.
“What do you want me to say? We have no other choice except to see if the medicine works.”
“It’s not working. We need to go.”
“We can’t get visas if we’re a flight risk.”
“We have steady jobs. We have a flat.”
“The city is burning, Dijana. We’re a flight risk.”
One of them was banging things around on the desk. “Besides,” my father said after a while. “I’ve already applied. For all of us.” I only vaguely understood the rules of passports and visas, what an attempt at obtaining them implied, but I knew better than to interrupt an argument. Instead I wrapped Rahela in an extra blanket, tugged at the doors still fortified with a double layer of X tape, and escaped out onto the balcony. The view from nine stories up spanned most of the city. A cluster of skyscrapers on the far right was a representative sampling of Zagreb’s more modern, uglier architecture. They were the Bra?a Domany towers, though no one seemed to know any Domany brothers or why they had apartment buildings named in their honor. The complex housed so many people it was a citywide joke that if you couldn’t track down an acquaintance, sending a letter in the general direction of the towers would suffice.
On the left, the twin peaks of Zagreb Katedrala stretched taller than all the surrounding buildings. I couldn’t remember a time when the cathedral wasn’t at least partly swathed in scaffolding and tarps, but that only added to its sense of majesty, its wounds a physical manifestation of the sorrows and confessions of the city. In nights before the war, two spotlights lit the stone towers in dual rushes of warm gold. Now, with the lights quelled in anticipation of a blackout, it was difficult to pinpoint the boundary between the spires and the night sky.
The hint of smoke still hung in the air, but the cloud over the upper town was slowly receding. I lay down on my back, pushed my legs between the metal slats of the railing, and hugged Rahela to my chest. She was awake but quieter now. Being out on the balcony always made me feel better when I was upset, and I wondered if she felt that, too.
After a while my mother called me back inside, scolding me for taking Rahela out in the cold. I tried to think of my mother the way she was before my sister was born, whether she had always been annoyed with me, but found it difficult to remember a life that did not revolve around a crying baby. “You’ve gotta get better,” I whispered to my sister. I wanted it as much for myself as for her, and felt guilty when I realized it.
I handed Rahela to my mother, and she shut the bedroom door. After a few minutes, my father came in and sat down at the piano. He played the first few bars of a Springsteen riff that had been popular before the war, then hit a wrong note and stopped. In happier times he’d played often; he’d take the pile of yellowing sheet music from inside the bench and let me pick a song. It was never perfect but always recognizable, and he’d never had a lesson.
Music, I’d heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn’t as good. Some nights when I was supposed to be doing homework, my father and I would take the cassette player down from the shelf and put it in the middle of the living room floor. When a song we liked came on the radio, we’d stop whatever we were doing, rush back to the living room, and dive at the cassette player like football goalies, arms flailing. One of us would push the Record button as we landed in a mess of rug burn and overenthusiastic athleticism. Then, before I was sent to bed, we’d add the new songs to the label and put the stereo back on the shelf, carefully filing the tape into our collection of songs missing the first ten seconds. Sometimes if a tape broke we would pull out its filmy, iridescent insides and stretch them around the room, running and laughing, our shins knocking against furniture legs. My mother, who called to us impatiently throughout most of our other attempts at procrastination, never interrupted these giddy dissections.