“Maybe you should both stay here. I’ll make you a snack.”
“Mama.” I slumped my shoulders in protest. I knew Luka had come because he’d deemed the desecration of Vukovar a good reason to skip class, but our chances of leaving were better if we acted as if nothing had changed. “We have to go to school,” I said. “We’re gonna be late.” But my mother, who refused to negotiate with whining, ignored me and began mixing Rahela’s formula. Luka and I skulked into the living room.
Having downed the soup and eager to escape the television, the refugee followed us and sat on the far end of the couch. His face was coated in stubble and mud, dirt smeared across his shirt and lodged beneath his overgrown fingernails. He made me nervous, and I wished my parents would be more attentive to their guest, but they were busy trying to get Rahela to eat something—an effort that had essentially become force-feeding—and neither of them noticed.
“He took my wife,” the refugee said. “I heard her screaming through the wall.”
Luka and I just stared, afraid to move.
“He had a necklace strung with ears. Ears off people’s heads.” The man cupped his head in his hands, pressing his fingers to his ears as if to check whether they were still attached. I yearned to go to school. After what seemed like much too long, my father poked his head around the corner.
“You’ll be back straight after class is through?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Yes,” I said, unaccustomed to curfews but willing to compromise.
“Go on then.”
We sprang from the couch under cover of clattering pans and collapsing building footage, and my father winked at us as we slipped out the door.
—
When I got home from school the refugee was gone. My parents didn’t say anything about where he went, and I didn’t ask. At sunset my father and I walked to Zrinjevac to look at the weather column at the edge of the park. He was wearing his mechanic’s jacket and I’d donned a coat and scarf, but it was balmy for November and soon we unzipped. My father pointed to the thermometer, explained the barometer, and lifted me up so I could run my fingers on the glass case that housed statistics for seasonal temperature averages and wind measurements.
“Maybe you’ll grow up to be a weatherwoman,” my father said. “You’d have to study hard, though.”
“Yes, Tata,” I said, but my mind was elsewhere. I climbed onto the rim of a nearby fountain, grabbing my father’s hand for balance as I strutted the perimeter of the now stagnant pool. “What’s going to happen to Rahela?”
“If she doesn’t get better she might have to see a doctor far away. But she’s going to be fine.”
“What’s going to happen for Christmas?” It was still more than a month away, but winter had always been my favorite season, the Trg ablaze with fairy lights and filled with vendors selling roasted chestnuts in paper cones, snow layering up on our balcony and in the streets below, the days off school. I was getting too old to believe in Sveti Nikola, but I still looked forward to leaving my boot on the windowsill and waking up to find presents stashed inside. This year, though, I wasn’t so sure; nothing seemed totally out of reach of the air raids and our dwindling food supply.
“What do you mean?”
“Are we still going to have it?”
“Full of worries tonight!” my father said. He grabbed the fringe of my scarf and brushed it against my face, tickling my cheek. “Have you got your scarf tied too tight? Of course we’re going to have it!”
There was something about talking with him that made me feel better, no matter the conversation. My mother used to say my father and I thought in the same circles. I never understood it until I watched us later, in memories—when we were gazing at the sky (and we often were) we could unconsciously turn in the same direction and extract the same face from the clouds. At the park, I laughed and my father lifted me up off the fountain rim and I was skinny from biking and rations and he carried me on his shoulders the whole way home.
—