The electricity faded in and out in fits that sometimes coincided with air raids but often seemed related to nothing at all, the whim of a damaged wire. When it happened during the day we didn’t notice at first. Then, when the shadows edged inward, one of us would reach for a lamp in the fading afternoon sun and be met with disappointment. Eventually we got used to its intermittent presence, and after a while didn’t even bother to light the candles we’d stockpiled, instead resigning ourselves to those activities to be carried out in darkness.
Then the water went. We’d had periods of outage before, but now it was gone often, and for longer stints. A twist of the faucet released a coppery sludge, then the angry hiss of air pressure. One morning before school, my mother woke me early and sent me to the courtyard with a pair of gas cans to bring back water from the pump for soup and bathing. City officials and other grown-ups called it the “municipal pump,” as if it had been designed for this purpose, but it was really a fire hydrant rigged with a wrench and some piping by one of the men in the building.
Down in the concrete clearing I swung the cans by their handles. The air was crisp, but in the sun it still wasn’t too cold. The landscape had transformed into something desolate: the cigarette and newspaper kiosks were all boarded up, the old man and his chocolates packed away, his folding table leaning against an alley wall, abandoned. The pump at least livened the place up again, if only for a few minutes at a time. When I came to the corner, I saw that most of the building’s residents were already outside clutching an odd collection of containers and broke into a run; the water often ran out and I’d been late the day before and only got half a canister. Two girls I knew from school were at the pump and they waved me to the front.
“Don’t cut the line, Juri?!” an old lady yelled at me, but I called back an excuse about Rahela being ill and went ahead to meet the girls. When I got there a stream of water hit me in the chest, the wetness spreading down my torso; Vjera—the perpetually pigtailed girl—had pressed her hand over the spigot, and the water shot out through her fingers like pent-up rays of sunlight.
“It’s cold!” I yelled, but already I was laughing. She aimed the water at my face now, and I caught it in my mouth, spraying it upward like the angel fountain in Zrinjevac. I grabbed at the pipe and twisted it in her direction, pegging her in the backs of the legs. We were hysterical now, laughing so hard it didn’t even make a sound. The old lady’s tolerance ran out and she came at us full-hobble, swinging her empty gas cans until one hit me upside the head.
“Get out of here before I call your mother,” the woman said. “All your mothers!” Ashamed, I quickly filled one of my canisters and darted home.
Inside my mother pressed a hand to her hip and pulled at the strands of wet hair plastered to my face.
“Ana, were you wasting the water?”
“It wasn’t my fault. Some girls from school sprayed me,” I said. Silence hung between us and I mumbled a sorry to break it.
“Let’s hope everybody has enough to drink now,” she said. Then after a while, she smiled a little and swiped again at my hair. “At least I don’t have to boil any for you. You’ve already had quite a shower.”
I smiled then, too, and watched as she heated the water on the stove and bathed with a washcloth in the middle of the kitchen. My mother’s hair was the color of burnt chestnuts, and when she moved, it shone.
—
That night I arrived home from school to find my mother and father standing face-to-face, staring hard at one another. Something was wrong. My father was home too early; his fists were clenched. When the door swung in and hit the wall, they jumped. My mother turned to wipe her eyes. My father began plunking dishes and spoons down on the table with too much force. My mother busied herself, too, was throwing tiny clothes that had once been mine and were now Rahela’s into a suitcase on the floor.
“Rahela,” I said. My parents seemed to slow slightly at the mention of her name. “Where is she?”
“She’s sleeping,” my mother said. They’d moved the cradle into the threshold between the kitchen and their bedroom, and I peered in. Too much blood on the blankets, down the front of her shirt. Her breathing shallow.
“What’s going on?”
“The medicine’s not working. She has to go.”
“To the hospital?”
“There’s nothing they can do for her here. There’s a program transporting out of Sarajevo. We’re going to take her tomorrow.”
“Transporting where?” I said.
“To America.”
I looked around. There were no other cases, no adult clothes in the bag. “By herself?”
“It’s a medical program. They’ll take good care of her,” said my father. “Once they fix her up she’ll come right back home.”
“I want to go to Sarajevo with you,” I said.
“No,” said my mother.
“We’ll see,” said my father.
The power was on for an hour or two, and my father made a series of calls, his hand cupped over the receiver to guide his voice through the shoddy connection. At first I assumed he was trying to reach MediMission, but I noticed him later scribbling out what looked like a map, which he folded and put in his back pocket.