“It’s still standing,” Luka called from down the path. I sped up and stood beside him on the slanted step. Through a clearing in the fig trees I could see Petar and Marina’s house, sealed up and covered in weeds. The fa?ade was pitted with scars from shell fragments, and a chunk of the roof was gone. No one would live in a place like that.
I jumped the last few steps and reached the terrace, waded through dead leaves to the front door, and stupidly began to knock.
“Hello?”
“Ana.”
“Just wait,” I said, and banged harder.
“Ana, come on. Don’t do that.”
“Hey! Get off that property!” someone said in heavily accented English.
“Sorry,” I called back in Croatian.
“Hrvatske?” the woman’s voice said.
“Yeah. We’re Croats.” I walked in the direction of the voice. “I’m looking for the Tomi?s?”
The woman appeared on the balcony of a house farther up the mountain than I expected given the clarity of the sound of her voice, an acoustic wonder of the cliffs I’d forgotten. She was wizened and swaddled in a black long-sleeved dress that made me sweat just looking at it, a red flowered head scarf tied at her chin. “Sorry,” she said when we got closer. “I thought you were tourists. The kids love to break into the abandoned ones.”
“Abandoned?” I said.
“They’ve been gone for years.”
“What happened to the owners?”
“Petar was killed in the war. That’s what Marina said. Did you know them?”
When she said it, it sounded true, like I had always known it, but that did not stop the feeling of loss, hard and stonelike, from dropping into my stomach. Still, she had spoken to Marina. “Marina’s here?”
“Not anymore. She came down for a while after Petar died. She was trying to get out. To Austria to live with her sister, she said.”
“Do you know if she made it? Where in Austria? How can I contact her?”
The woman shook her head. “Sorry, kid. You look familiar, though. Where did you say you were from?”
“We used to come for holidays with Petar and Marina when I was small. I’m Ana. Juri?.”
“Juri?. Yes,” she said, adjusting her head scarf. “So you’re the one.”
I looked at the woman and tried to discern what she meant. “The one what?” I said finally.
“The one who lived.”
“I lived.”
“You look like your father.”
“You knew him?”
“I knew them all.”
“Baka,” a small voice called from inside the house.
“I’m going to the church now. Come later, to talk.”
“I will,” I said, but she was gone quickly back into her house, and I stayed on her terrace staring up at the space where she had stood.
—
Luka broke open the back window, and I slid through into the cobwebbed darkness. The air inside was heavy, laden with years of dirt. The walls were bare, the kitchen supplies gone, and I tried to determine how much of a hurry Marina had been in when she left. The ugly auburn couch was still pressed against the wall, the table and stove next to one another in the area that, though technically part of the same room, Marina had declared the kitchen. Despite its barrenness and sour smell, the place looked the same.
“Go open the front,” Luka called. “I’m too big to fit through here.”
I lurched toward the door, but my presence in the house was a trip wire of disintegration; a set of blinds fell from their place in the side window and a thick beam of light penetrated the dark kitchen.
I saw my parents—summer skin, sweat-slicked and tanned. My mother stood at the kitchen sink, wringing out laundry and humming an old children’s rhyme, my father rounding the corner and joining her song with a whistle. His hands crept up the folds of her dress, exploring her hip bones. The water sloshed in the sink as he spun her around and kissed her forehead. From this angle, I saw her dress clinging tight around her midriff and realized she would have been a few months pregnant with Rahela the last time we’d gone to Tiska.
I heard Luka fiddling with the front door, and soon he’d managed to break it open himself. An overwhelming glare filled the house. I blinked my parents away.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Nothing.” He opened the remaining shades and shutters and windows, then disappeared into the back bedroom, where I could hear him doing the same. A concrete box, the house had been designed as a haven from the southern sun—but now, with all the blinds up and the roof broken, it was the brightest I’d ever seen it. The breeze pushed the stale air out the windows.
Luka emerged from the bathroom with a set of brooms. Petar and Marina had always used the bathtub for storing cleaning supplies and tools; the house had no hot water, so there was no real difference between the outdoor shower and the one in the bathroom.
“Come on, then,” Luka said, jabbing me with the end of a broomstick.
“How’d you know they were in there?”
“Don’t you remember that summer your father and Petar were resurfacing the terrace and they kept tracking the cement dust in the house and your mom and Marina were going mental?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“You and I swept for like three days straight. I’m practically traumatized.”