Luka and his father wandered the house in their underwear. Luka was lean and lithe, understated muscles rippling as he paced the living room. I looked him up and down; he was about Brian’s height. Thinner legs, but broader shoulders. Darker skin. It was a good body, desirable even, and I liked looking at it, could feel my eyes lingering on his abs as he passed. But there were the other parts of Luka—the small smile, the wiry black hair standing on end—that had stayed the same. In those parts he was ten to me.
Miro’s stomach hung low over the band of his briefs, a tub of pasty flesh in stark contrast with the deep tan of his forearms, which his summer police uniform exposed. He was sweating from places I didn’t know one could sweat, and it was gathering in creases of parts that shouldn’t have been creased. The house was filled with the tang of bodies.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “You wanna go somewhere?”
“Like for a pizza?”
“Tiska.”
“Tiska. You sure you want to go down that way, on the southern road?” There was only one main road that spanned the country north to south. A day’s drive from Zagreb to Split, then a few smaller offshoots to take us the rest of the way down to Tiska.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I heard you leave last night.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I just went for a bike ride.” He knew I was lying, I could tell, but he had seen history blaze across my pupils, and left it alone.
“I’ll see if I can get the car.”
In the morning Luka began a campaign of pleading with his mother to let us borrow the family Renault 4. As children we’d been much freer than American ten-year-olds, but now there’d been a strange reversal: Luka and all the other university students were living at home, beholden to their parents.
In the end it was unclear whether or not we’d actually gotten permission to take the car, but we acted as if we had, Luka palming the keys from their nail on the wall. The car, which had once been white, was now mostly rust. We packed the trunk with clothes, water jugs, two orange blankets, and a machete from the shed and left without saying goodbye, in case we weren’t supposed to be going.
We stopped at the grocery store for provisions. We filled a cart with cases of milk—the kind in cardboard boxes that doesn’t need to be refrigerated—bags of granola, farmer cheese, and a fresh loaf of black bread. In the first winter of the war, after my parents had been killed and we were hungry, Luka and I had swept through this same store, gathering packets of powdered soup and carrying them to the pet food aisle, which no workers monitored. We tore at the packaging with our teeth and passed a packet between us, salty and stinking of onions. In Croatia, at the start of 1992, this did not feel like stealing. I glanced at Luka for any sign of this memory, but he had probably been in the store hundreds of times since then, and he pushed the cart toward the checkout. We paid.
A few minutes later, before we’d reached the highway entrance, Luka pulled off the road into the parking lot of the technical high school.
“You drive?” he said.
“Yeah. Not stick though.”
Luka got out of the car, and I slid over the center console into the driver’s seat. Driving stick was like a seesaw, Luka explained. About keeping a balance of pressure. “Press that pedal on the left all the way to the floor.”
I pressed the wrong one, and the engine revved wildly.
“Your other left.” The car was so old it had a manual choke, and he reached across me to slide the vented lever up until the motor sounded less like it was being strangled. I looped around the lot for a while without stalling, shifted into first, second, third.
“All right,” he said, gesturing for me to turn out onto the main road. “You’re ready.”
—
“WHAT DO I DO?” I yelled. I had caught a traffic light on a steep incline, and when the light changed and I took my foot from the brake the car began an unfamiliar backward slide. I slammed the pedal back against the floor.
“Just give it a little gas.” Behind me the drivers honked. I pulled my clutch foot up too fast, and the car sputtered, then went quiet. Someone passed us on the shoulder. Luka reached over and turned the car off, then told me to restart it, but I just glowered at him until the light had gone red again.
“Calm down,” he said in an unfazed manner I found infuriating.
“Fuck this.” I wrenched the key in the ignition; the engine howled as I gunned it across the intersection. More honking. I pulled over.
“You were doing fine. You have to learn. I can’t drive the whole trip.”
“That was not fine.”
Luka sighed. “You’re impatient,” he said, which, because it was true, hurt more than a harsher insult. We switched places. “You’re driving once we get out of Zagreb,” he said, and flipped on the radio.