After dinner, when an especially violent air raid rattled the windows of our flat, my mother sprang up and held me and I knew I could win her over.
“Did you finish your homework?” she asked when we returned from the basement.
“I don’t have to since I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I tried.
My mother sighed.
“I want to say goodbye to her, too.”
“Better go to bed then. We’re getting up early.”
On the couch I lay listening to my parents shuffle around the flat.
“She shouldn’t be going with us,” my mother said. “The road isn’t safe.”
“It’s not safe here either, Dijana. What if something were to happen while we were gone? It’s better we stay together.” I heard the paper crumpling and remembered my father’s drawing. “Besides. Look. I called Miro and he gave me the latest intel. We’ll have to take the long way, but it’ll be clear. We’ll be fine.”
I stared at the ceiling, imagining the ride through the mountains with Luka’s father’s map, then some MediMission stranger carrying Rahela in the airport, on a plane, in America. I knew little of America besides what I’d seen on television, mostly cowboy movies they played on state TV Saturday nights. The United States seemed to me a wonderland full of actors who subsisted on McDonald’s, and I wondered if Rahela would go to live with someone rich and famous. On the news men in suits were always calling on the States to help protect us, but no one had shown up yet. Maybe they were just too far away. I slept fitfully, the kind of sleep in which you never quite lose contact with the waking world, and after just a few hours I heard the clack of my mother’s shoes alongside my couch.
“Time to go,” she said. My arms and legs felt leaden and I struggled to dress, rummaging through my clothes in the morning dark.
7
“Ivan, molim te, don’t drive so fast. We don’t need to give them a reason to pull us over.” My mother pressed her free hand against my father’s knee. With the other arm she cradled Rahela, who was too weak even to cry. On the horizon, day had not yet broken. It was cold; the back window was stuck half-open, and my father gave me his jacket to use as a blanket. Whenever he turned too sharply, Rahela’s suitcase banged me in the shin and my mother implored him to slow down. At some point I fell asleep.
When I woke the sun was noon-strong through the streaky windshield and we had already crossed the border into Bosnia; the signposts were written in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and the road circled the bases of the Dinaric Alps in a serpentine coil. We called the road a highway, though it wasn’t really—not the kind with streetlamps—and in the spaces between more important destinations it was only two lanes.
Like the areas in Croatia far from Zagreb, Bosnia was mainly full of nothing: vast expanses of rocky soil, so that even the grass looked like it’d prefer to be rooted somewhere else. Clusters of cement-block houses appeared every so often but seemed to dissolve against the bleach-bright sky as we sped past. Finally, signs presented us with digestible distances to Sarajevo: 75, 50, 25 kilometers.
“Allaaaaaahu akbar,” the adhan began as we passed a peripheral mosque at the limits of the capital. We didn’t have mosques in Zagreb, at least not ones with public presences, and I cranked the window down the rest of the way to soak in the mysterious strains of the muezzin’s call. Rahela slept through it, and I craned my neck around the headrest to survey the rise and fall of her chest.
Sarajevo was on edge, the expectation and anxiety almost palpable. The war hadn’t yet come to Bosnia, and the haze of a city left to wait was familiar, though more like a remembered dream than an actual place I’d lived. We passed through the city center, the curvature of mosque domes and sharp angles of Yugoslav skyscrapers forming a rugged skyline. Still, Sarajevo and its inhabitants seemed similar to, if a bit cheerier than people in Zagreb. Markale market was not yet infamous; the parliament building stood boxy and firm, though it was the bloodshed here, not ours, that would catch the attention of the international community in the end. Gazing through the back window at children my age playing stickball in the street, I thought of our war games and generator bike fights and wondered if the things I’d come to consider ordinary were not so normal after all.
My mother traced her finger along a sheet of directions, and my father maneuvered through the alleys in accordance with her commands.
“That’s it!” she said suddenly, and my father pulled the car up on the curb to make room for passersby on the narrow street. I recognized the MediMission logo, red and gray and loud, affixed to a corner concrete building. Clutching Rahela, my mother ran across the street without even checking for traffic.