“Enough!” said our teacher. We quieted.
An air raid, she explained, was when planes flew over cities and tried to knock buildings down with bombs. She drew chalky maps denoting shelters, listed the necessities our families should bring underground with us: AM radio, water jug, flashlight, batteries for the flashlight. I didn’t understand whose planes wanted what buildings to explode, or how to tell a regular plane from a bad one, though I was happy for the reprieve from regular lessons. But soon she began to swipe at the board, inciting an angry cloud of eraser dust. She let out a sigh as if she were impatient with air raids, brushing the settling chalk away from the pleats in her skirt. We moved on to long division, and were not offered a time for asking questions.
—
It happened when I was running errands for my mother. I was supposed to get milk, which came in slippery plastic bags that wiggled during any attempt at pouring or gripping, and I’d rigged a cardboard box to my bike’s handlebars to carry the uncooperative cargo. But all the stores nearest our flat had run out—stores were running out of everything now—and I commissioned Luka to join the quest. Expanding the search, we ventured deeper into the city.
The first plane flew so low Luka and I swore later to anyone who would listen that we’d seen the pilot’s face. I ducked, my handlebars twisting beneath me, and fell from my bike. Luka, who’d been looking skyward but had forgotten to stop pedaling, crashed into my wreckage and landed facedown, cutting his chin on the cobblestone.
We scrambled to our feet, adrenaline overriding pain as we tried to right our bikes.
Then the alarm. The grained crackle of shoddy audio equipment. The howl of the siren, like a woman crying out through a megaphone. We ran. Across the street and through the side alleys.
“Which one’s closest?” Luka called over the noise. I visualized the map on the blackboard at school, stars and arrows marking different paths.
“There’s one underneath the kindergarten.” Beneath the slide of our first playground, a set of cement steps led to a steel door, triple-thick, as fat as a dictionary. Two men held the door open and people funneled from all directions down into the shadows. Reluctant to leave our bicycles to fend for themselves in the impending doom, Luka and I dropped them as close to the entrance as possible.
The shelter smelled of mold and unwashed bodies. When my eyes adjusted I surveyed the room. There were bunk beds, a wooden bench near the door, and a generator bicycle in the far corner. My classmates and I would come to fight over the bike in subsequent raids, elbowing one another for a turn converting pedals into the electricity that powered the lights in the shelter. But the first time we barely noticed it. We were occupied with surveying the odd collection of people seized from their daily activities and smashed together in a Cold War lair. I studied the group closest to me: men in business suits, or coveralls and mechanics’ jackets like my father’s, women in pantyhose and pencil skirts. Others in aprons with babies at their hips. I wondered where my mother and Rahela were; there was no public shelter near our building. Then I heard Luka calling for me and realized we’d been separated by an influx of newcomers. I felt my way in his direction, identifying him by the outline of his unruly hair.
“You’re bleeding,” I said.
Luka wiped his chin with his arm, tried to make out the line of blood on his sleeve.
“I thought it would happen. I heard my dad talking about it last night.” Luka’s father worked for the police academy and was in charge of training new recruits. I was annoyed Luka hadn’t mentioned the possibility of a raid earlier. He looked comfortable there in the dark, his arm draped on the rung of a bunk bed ladder.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” I said. I wasn’t. Not yet.
The siren again, signaling an all-clear. The men pressed back the door and we ascended the stairs, unsure of what to expect. Aboveground it was still daylight and the sun obscured my vision as much as darkness had below. I saw spots. When they dissipated, the playground came into focus just as I’d remembered it. Nothing had happened.
At home I barged through the front door, announcing to my mother that there was no milk left in the entire city of Zagreb. She pushed her chair back from the kitchen table, where she’d been grading a pile of student assignments, and shifted Rahela closer up against her chest as she stood. Rahela cried.
“Are you okay?” my mother asked. She gathered me up in a forceful embrace.
“I’m fine. We went to the kindergarten. Where’d you and Rahela go?”