“I’m sure that excuse goes over well with your mother.”
Inside Luka swept and scoured the floor and scrubbed the countertops, and I spent the afternoon pulling the vines that choked the windows. The space between my shoulder blades got sore quickly, and I realized how little I actually moved anymore, how content I was to be hunched in a subway seat or over my desk at school. But I liked the discomfort now, a productive pain, and I moved on from the fa?ade to the patio itself, weeding and cleaning in methodical square patches. The roots of the overgrowth were deep and clung obstinately to thick clods of soil. I threw the weeds and vines in what used to be the compost pile and set my sights on the layers of dirt and dust and sand that coated the terrace, sweeping it into piles and scooping it away with a metal dustpan and brush I remembered Petar banging out in the front yard.
Beneath a dirty patch near the front door I unearthed the handprints. In the summer my father and Petar had poured new concrete for the patio, we’d each left a handprint in the square by the door. It was my idea.
“If you’re bad, I’ll cover up your handprint and you’ll be erased from the family!” Petar had teased whenever he wanted me to run an errand for him. Now I stood before the inlay, pressed my hand into the contours of his, and considered how easy it was to erase a family. I traced my parents’ hand shapes, then my own, my nine-year-old fingertips barely reaching the first knuckles of my fingers now. At the corner of the block, a vaguely toe-shaped smudge was pressed in the cement. Jealous but too embarrassed to add his own handprint to what he deemed to be a family plot, Luka had planted his big toe in the concrete. Then, even more ashamed, he hadn’t washed the cement off quickly enough, and it took days to peel from his skin.
“Hey, Luka! Come see this!”
Luka appeared, sweaty and shirtless. “What is it?”
“Your toe has stood the test of time!”
“Are those your parents’?”
“And Petar’s and Marina’s, yeah.”
“And yours,” he said.
“Yeah. And mine.”
“I’m glad you have this,” he said, turning back in to the house. For a minute I wondered whether he was going to try to cut the rock out of the ground, but he returned instead with my backpack, and dug through it to find my camera. “Here.”
I took two pictures and set them inside on the table to develop. “Get my wallet out of there, too,” I said. “Let’s go to the store.”
We climbed the stairs back to the upper footpath toward the village store.
“Do you think you’ll go look for Marina?” Luka said. I thought of the day I escaped and wondered whether Petar had died or had gone back to the front and saved others. If he’d been caught in those woods, Marina might think I was dead, too.
“I want to. But it’s harder for me to wander around Austria than it is here.”
“I could go with you if you want.”
“Maybe I’ll try to write her somehow first.”
“If she’s alive, you should visit.”
“Let me do it,” I said.
“I will. But I won’t let you wait another decade this time.”
—
The bells on the door jingled when we made our way inside, and an ancient man glanced up from his Dalmacija News with disinterest. The store’s main stock—bread, fatty white cheese, stamps, and cigarettes—was laid out on a card table. In the cooler nearby were mackerels and mussels the fishermen had brought in. Luka and I picked two mackerels from the case. Luka asked for olive oil, and the man wrapped the fish in newspaper, then retrieved a small cruet. He added a book of matches to the pile.
“Does the pay phone still work?” I said. The phone attached to the side of the store had been the only one in the village when I was young, and even then it was finicky.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Do you want a phone card?”
“Please,” I said. “For America.”
He pulled a plastic card from beneath the till in the register that said NORTH AMERICA in bold lettering across the front, and added it to our total. Luka peeled a hundred-kuna note from his billfold, and the man put our food in a brown paper bag.
“Come back Wednesday, if you want,” he said as we left. “Some chocolate’s coming in.”
“I’m going to go get a fire started,” Luka said, handing me the phone card. “I’ll see you back at the house.”
I’d only made one other phone call from Tiska, when my mother forgot her bathing suit and let me call home to have my father bring it. She’d stood behind me, folded the cord just right, and held it above our heads like an antenna. I tried replicating her maneuver, shifting the bends in the wire until I got a tone, then hastily dialing the series of numbers on the back of the card followed by my American home number.
“Ana?”
“Can you hear me?”
“Barely! How are you? I’ve been so worried!”
“I’m fine. We’re down the coast. No Internet and stuff. Sorry I haven’t been in touch more.”