“Besides,” Luka said eventually, as if he’d continued weighing the pros and cons of our potential relationship in his head. “You know too much.” But I couldn’t help thinking as I hovered between waking and sleep, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
I resurfaced a few hours later; it was still dark and my feet had gone numb. Once in New York water had seeped into my snow boots and frozen between my toes, but I still couldn’t remember a time when I felt this helplessly cold. Covered in gooseflesh and shivering, I unrolled the jeans I’d been using as a pillow and pulled them on over my shorts.
“Luka,” I whispered. “It’s so fucking cold.” Luka stirred, and I hoped he’d wake up, but instead he mumbled something that to my best guess was “socks” and turned over. My thoughts felt slow, my limbs weighted. I inched my chair closer to his.
2
Hours later I felt the sun on my face, first pleasant, then hot and pulsing. We died, I thought. Then a jagged pain tore up the length of my leg. I sat up, shielding my eyes against the morning and saw the outline of the fake policeman, now striking Luka with his nightstick and cursing.
“Derelicts!” he yelled, along with insults about our mothers’ relationships with livestock. “You tricked me! Get the hell out of here!”
“We can’t walk when you’re smashing us in the legs!” I said. He stopped for a moment, as if to consider the argument, and Luka and I took off over the fence, trailing the orange blankets behind us.
We pushed through thick sea grass toward the public beach. The air was salty-sweet, a seawater and pine mix that had in my childhood signaled the start of summer vacation. It was still early and there were few people on the beach. I slipped off my sandals and was met with the stabbing pain of tiny pointed rocks.
“Jesus,” I said, jumping back into my shoes. “They’re so sharp.” I had grown used to the less spectacular but sandy coastline of south Jersey.
“Yeah, you’ll have to work on your calluses.”
At water’s edge Luka dropped his blanket and pants and ran into the sea. “It’s warm!” he called and dove beneath the surface. I stripped to my bra and underwear, then immediately felt embarrassed. I’d studied Luka’s shirtless physique back in Zagreb; it was only natural that he might examine me in my adult form, with hips and breasts. I wanted him to like what he saw. I looked down at my thighs, adjusted my bra strap. I wished for a towel. Nothing to be done about it now, I thought, and ran awkwardly into the sea until I was deep enough to swim, eager to cover myself and lift my smarting feet from the rocks.
The water was calmer than I remembered, nothing like the constant fight against tide and undertow that came with swimming in the ocean. Looking down, I was surprised to see my own legs, unobscured by the swirling sediment of the mid-Atlantic. I put my head back and succumbed to the bobbing rhythm of the not-quite-waves. Just when I’d begun to wonder whether one could sleep that way, something slick and powerful gripped my ankle and pulled me downward. I screeched and kicked until the thing released me and Luka appeared beside me in hysterics.
“God, you’re evil,” I said.
We were treading water, and our legs brushed one another. Luka ran his hand through his hair. “Come on. We better go if we want to get to Tiska before dark.”
We jumped the fence back into Solaris to retrieve the car. We sat on the hood and downed half a bag of muesli and a box of UHT milk, and afterward I changed my clothes in the backseat. The guard gave us the finger as we sped through the exit, and we returned to the main road.
Luka drove and I lay across the back, paging through the final segment of Rebecca West’s journey and looking out the window. The landscape was growing increasingly mountainous, the highland vegetation parched a tawny hue, making the ridges look almost golden.
Luka was trying to calculate how long it would take to forget the war.
“Maybe we’re already on the way,” I said. “The last five or six years’ worth of kids have been born outside of wartime. Postwar babies.”
“Everyone’s still talking about it,” said Luka.
“Here maybe. But talking’s not the same as living through it.”
“You don’t need to experience something to remember it. You’re going to have kids, and eventually they’re going to want to know where their other set of grandparents is.”
“And I’ll say they died.”
“You should tell them the truth.”
“That is the truth. They died.”
“The whole story. You should tell Rahela, too. She deserves to know.”
“I know,” I said. I let the book fall closed in my lap. I looked out at the gilded mountains and thought of the centuries of wars and mistakes that had come together in this place. History did not get buried here. It was still being unearthed.
“What is that monstrosity you’re reading?”
I told him about West and her trip through Yugoslavia. “Same shit, different war.”
“Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.”
“I hope that’s not true,” I said.
3